It must have been a slow internet news day, because someone at EpicFU found ShapeShop and mentioned it in an internet newscasty-type-thing. Starts at about 1:50 in the video below. The “segment” only lasts for about 10 seconds, and they could have picked a better clip, but hey, I’ll take it…

(what’s with the crazy vampire eyes…?)

ShapeShop B5 has been released. What’s new and exciting in this beta? Hold on to your pants:

• COLLADA and STL mesh export. And since ShapeShop models are always water-tight, you can 3D print your mesh at ShapeWays.I would use COLLADA for ShapeWays, I haven’t had much luck with STL…
• Hollow Operator. Hollowing a solid model means removing the interior so that it uses less material to 3D print (and hence is cheaper at ShapeWays). Basically hollowing converts a solid volume into a thin shell, so you might find it useful for other modeling tasks, too. The Hollow operator is not documented yet, but you’ll find it in the menu at Shapes > Operators > Hollow Operator, or in the right-click context menu in the tree.
• Bug Fixes. If your save files were loading models with weirdly-rotated parts, that bug should now be squashed. Also, the most recent NVidia driver seems to have introduced an OpenGL bug, but it was easy to work-around. And last but not least, for those of you with Intel GMA950 cards whose strokes were not showing up when you sketched, I think I have that licked.
• Mirror Operator. That’s right – the most requested feature in the ShapeShop forums is now implemented. And because ShapeShop is volumetric and procedural, you can arbitrarily mirror basically anything, including multiple-mirroring. Naturally, I have yet to document this feature in the manual, but I have created the tutorial video. I embedded it below, but you’ll have to head over to Vimeo to see the full-resolution version (make sure you go full-screen, so that you can read the text!).

And finally, a delightful scuplture created by ShapeShop user Andusan, with ShapeShop and Modo:

What are you waiting for? Go download ShapeShop B5!

These models were created by CG Artist Corien Clapwijk (also known as Andusan). The modeling was done usingShapeShop and Modo, and then painting and rendering was done in Modo, with a bit of post in Photoshop. Click for full resolution images.

 

Check out Andusan’s gallery at CGSociety for a bunch of interesting work.

I have also added quite a few images to the gallery, if you’re interested…